SIGNS

One of the things that I love about America is its signage. It can be so fiendishly complicated that it makes exiting the Freeway the most terrifying of prospects, and yet so fiendishly simple and direct at the same time. In marketing terms, no opportunity for a bad rhyming couplet is ignored so that a small town pizzeria, for example, will survive on the most excruciatingly awful punnery.

“We toss ’em… They’re awesome!” is the one that has stuck with me (which goes to show that it works…) but there were plenty more, and such techniques really become ubiquitous as even a little pizzeria like that will have signs bearing its slogan on the highway anything up to fifty miles away so that a silly little phrase like that one will have already stuck in your head long before you get to the town itself, and the familiarity of seeing it again and remembering it from when you were on the road is very effective.

We didn’t eat there of course, but I’m pretty sure we got some nice shots of the outside of their shop.

Wherever you go, some little shop or other will be doing its level best to draw attention to itself. That is, of course, only to be expected in a country which is so brutally led by market forces. Sometimes it seems as if every available surface has been covered with as much marketing material and signage as is humanly possible, and then they’ve added some more.

In Sonoma, for example, every sign we saw seemed to bear the logo “Sonoma Signs” in the corner, as if someone had personally made it his mission (or at least his job) to provide as many signs as it was humanly possible to do in one small town. Still, perhaps even in America there must come a saturation point where nobody else feels that they need any more signs, and if that were to happen, what would become of his small-town sign-making business?

More evidence of this could be seen in the central valley where every farm seemed to have a hand-painted sign in very similar style showing the name of the farm, a picture of the farmer and his family, and a picture of whatever fruit or vegetable they grew. It was almost as if a sign-painter had gone to every door of every farmhouse and asked them if they wanted a sign painting for next to the highway, which is, I suppose, precisely what did happen.

As we were strolling around the various small towns we visited recently, I became rather obsessed with the signage, and started pointing my camera and clicking at just about every sign I saw. Perhaps it was the latent graphic artist in me resurfacing, whilst I was supposed to be “off duty” (although can anyone who works in the visual arts ever really be “off duty”…?), but I did so much so that I probably have far too many of the dullest set of holiday pictures ever taken.

Interestingly too, I was mooching around in a gift shop towards the end of the trip, wondering whether the luggage weight allowance would allow me to buy a couple of books of old postcards which I was looking at when the proprietor of the restaurant attached to the shop came in and told the woman behind the counter that she was to allow the young girl with him to take anything she needed and charge it to him. Then he rather proudly gave his reason. This young girl was going to be creating their “new” signage in the near future.

He seemed very impressed, in that way older men can sometimes do when around a young girl, that she was able to recreate “By hand!” pretty much any typeface she wanted to. Even though I was inwardly snorting with derision at another example of a graphic artist convincing another customer that something that comes so easily to us is something deceptively complicated, on later reflection I realised that the old sign-writing skills are probably very rare in this day and age where much of the typography that you see is laid out, created and rendered on machines, and perhaps the ability to hand paint such things is far more unusual than it was in my day when hand lettering skills were ten a penny.

Certainly now, when I begin the endless trawl through all of those photographs that I took, I’m more aware of just how many old hand-painted signs there seem to be in the parts of America which I have visited, and they are the ones that I remember especially clearly, and on the old photographs in that postcard book that I did eventually buy and bring home, it is the old signs that speak to me of  old-time America and how different a “Go get ’em” world it seems to have been from the repressed, understated ways of old Europe.

I suppose that maybe, like a lot of holiday snaps which include certain things that might seem currently a little mundane, perhaps one day they’ll be seen as historically fascinating even if, at this precise moment, even I’m just looking through them thinking “Why on Earth did I take that one…?”

When it comes to my snapshots, for example, I can get quite irritated when a modern car sneaks into the frame but, in about twenty years time, perhaps I will look through them again and be intrigued by all those old cars and bizarre fashions that we once wore and have to remind myself why all the people who kept getting “in my way” were looking at tiny little screens as they walked along.

The potential for million “Channel 57” retrospective evenings about the first part of the century, with social observers, columnists and radio DJs burbling on about things like “Do you remember iPhones…? Yeah, I had one of those… I could never get it to work properly…” comes to mind and I shudder at the thought…